If you think social media is bad for teenagers, imagine what so-called “baby media” does to babies. These colorful videos look fun from the outside, and one can misinterpret the infant’s eyes being glued to their screen as fascination or delight. It’s natural that parents show their kids things they seem to enjoy, and they might even think they’re doing a good thing by exposing them to this cheery entertainment.

The problem is, growing babies learn from high-bandwidth, back-and-forth sensory interaction — not “content.” Our nervous systems are hardwired to use and learn from all our muscles and senses in concert, interacting with three-dimensional people and objects. Babies learn by putting things in their mouth, making faces, wiggling and noticing the results.

That applies doubly to social learning. Infants learn by imitating and practicing. They coo while their mothers speak in sing-song (which is referred to as “parentese”). They learn by sound, mimicry and serve-and-return interaction first and foremost, because it underlies both social and physical skills. Full three-dimensional awareness develops years later, and being able to see three-dimensional content on flat screens develops later still.

Practicing social skills with real people worked well until it didn’t. For millennia, most babies always had people around to play with: parents, older siblings, relatives and neighbors. Any live human was fair game for cuddling or teasing, and many people liked playing with them. Work was manual, so it was simple enough to entertain the baby in the kitchen, the workshop or the field. In physical settings, babies get to practice with actual playmates.

Fast-forward to our screen-saturated present. Parents are often at work, and older kids are at school. Both are typically on screens. The age-old supply of social companions has dried up, leaving babies lonely. For many guardians, the solutions are either to pay for professional childcare by the hour or to subject little ones to vivid screen entertainment, which costs far less. In crass economic terms, parents must choose between connecting with their baby or having money. That is a toxic tradeoff.

But at least the toxicity can be understood epidemiologically, and the tradeoffs understood economically. Both are needed to realize and fight baby media’s negative influence.

Economics vs. epidemiology

Economics is the weaker of these two sciences, being deeply unprincipled. The profession praises capitalism professionally, yet in its core competency, information flow, still can’t tell up from down: should information flow unhindered and unmodified, to benefit society, or should information be filtered and amplified for private profit? It can’t be both ways.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, epidemiology — the study of how ill-health spreads within populations and how that spread can be controlled — is as deeply scientific as particle physics. It balances subtle hypotheses spanning multiple streams of data and leverages its conclusions to save human lives. This branch of science is how diseases and environmental dangers from germs to chemicals are discovered, understood and fought. Its full statistical power is the best way to manage growing threats to public health: COVID-19, cigarettes, fentanyl and electronic screens.

Economics investigates the connection between behavior and money. Epidemiology investigates the connection between behavior and public health. When both are in play, cash flow impacts public health.

Sometimes, the interaction is beneficial, like when a profitable new vaccine or therapy saves lives. But malignant interactions grow exponentially, especially when biological instincts are up for grabs. For example, opium chemically creates cravings, which affects behavior, which affects profit. The profit is concentrated and actionable, while the damage appears as distant externalities. “Externalities” is the catch-all term for unintended and long-term consequences, the unplanned results that happen off the spreadsheets. Externalities are always the problem.

For instance, in the Opium Wars of the 19th century, Britain systematically profited by creating drug addiction in China — the profit was local, while the damage was distant. Today, the similarly addictive chemical nicotine drives a profit cycle via the tobacco industry. Alcohol and sugar cause similar problems while supporting large industries. Now all of those are regulated, because for a society to survive long-term, it must limit attractive products that hurt the populace. As I’ll soon describe, baby media is one of those dangerous products.

Baby media hacks and damages babies’ brains

It’s clear that chemicals like opium and nicotine drive basic urges. But videos aren’t chemicals at all, just patterns of light and sound. How could patterns of pixels hack our brains’ biology?

They do it the same way chemicals do. Chemicals carry both fuel and information. Some we need in bulk, like water and air. Others we’re sensitive to in trace amounts, like vitamins. Opium and nicotine happen to trigger mind-altering and behavior-changing pathways in the brain (and to a lesser degree, alcohol and sugar do as well). The particular patterns of atoms in opium and nicotine “hack” our information processing.

Particular patterns of light and sound work similarly. Bright flowers send attractive signals, while camouflage does the opposite, erasing the signals of a creature’s presence. Our nervous systems are tuned from birth to interpret specific colors, shapes, frequencies and movements as meaning certain things. Pre-programmed biological boosts are crucial cues for filling in a rich, detailed world.

Babies not only make cries and coos which pull the mother’s heartstrings; she makes sounds which touch her baby, too. Her sing-song “Hello, baby!” voice or soothing tones were primed by primate physiology ten million years ago. The baby’s nervous system knows those sounds mean Mom is near, so the child instinctively responds. That natural, native back-and-forth at certain frequencies and cadences is why the mother-baby bond appears in the first place. Those patterns taste sweet to the child’s heart and mind.

In that informational sense, baby media is taking candy from a baby, over and over. The jangly, clangy, ultra-high-pitched frequencies on shows like Chip and Potato, Ms. Rachel and CoComelon catch a baby’s attention; their frequency spectra overlap with the ones the baby’s nervous system naturally enjoys. So, those shows capture babies’ attention specifically by triggering vibratory mother-infant bonding instincts. Likewise, the shows’ looming, veering cartoon faces and frequent cutscenes cue nearby motion to the primary visual cortex. It’s ear-candy and eye-candy, in other words, and not by accident. The creators of CoComelon, for instance, algorithmically optimized the show for this.

When such patterns grab a baby’s attention, the kid responds as if called by a real person, typically by looking or wiggling. They then expect the person to respond. In real life, this would be a perfect data-gathering opportunity for the child.

But when watching a video, if the show’s pre-recorded response is timed just right — as some are — the baby might be fooled into thinking it received its desired answer. But the screen is just a screen, and doesn’t pay attention to the baby. Every time the video and sound provoke them into tasting the sweetness of anticipated play, the reward is yanked back. Mom never appears. That moment’s bonding instinct is wasted, and a precious chance to gather social data is desensitized. It alienates the young mind a little bit more, as the child falls for a machine in place of a person, and is then jilted.

This is the same dynamic as social media, in fact. The algorithms that so successfully manipulate teenagers into spending hours a day on social media provoke the same innate instincts as those locking babies’ eyes to screens. The difference is that social media uses the selection and timing of content such as posts and videos, while baby media hacks babies’ brains using the native harmonies of the nervous system. Both of them desensitize and disrupt basic nervous system function.

It doesn’t just damage social skills. Children can’t make three-dimensional sense of a two-dimensional screen until the age of three (the video deficit effect). And that’s if the kid grew up strictly in our three-dimensional world. Unfortunately, touch screen tablets, in the same way as baby media, harness native urges for novelty and interaction to keep kids’ eyes and fingers glued to glass.

In order to learn multi-sensory consistency and physical reality, babies search out novelty, the frontier beyond what they already know. Tablets are delightfully interesting, of course, but their novelty cheats by deviating from our world with surprising, disconnected lights and sounds. So interaction with a tablet poisons babies’ training data. Babies who use tablets will undoubtedly face later problems with spatial skills, navigation and stereo vision, just as children who spend too much time on close focus become near-sighted — which is a growing worldwide problem blamed on education, not on screens. Epidemiology will discover the damage to babies soon enough, but can it save the day?

The battle against baby media begins

The imminent battle over baby media is horribly lopsided. Corporations outgun pro-child advocates millions-fold.

Anti-digital advocates have at best millions of dollars of funding, while media companies have trillions. Advocates promote laborious studies on hundreds of people, while companies surveil whole populations automatically. Advocates know little about companies, while companies know loads about us. Humans have nervous systems easily dazzled by distraction and misdirection, which companies are paid to exploit, fueled by biometric data and protected by fig-leaf disclaimers and disclosures.

The deepest asymmetry, paradoxically, is ethical. Human morality forbids experimenting on people, but that wasn’t always the case. The infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis deliberately and secretly withheld medical treatment from sick people over decades. The Nazi physician Josef Mengele performed such awful and specific experiments on prisoners that medical science has renounced and forever forsworn using such experiments, data or lessons. The notorious Stanford Prison Experiment spurred the creation of human subjects protections, restricting university experiments from harming their subjects. These rules make gathering direct medical evidence of harm to humans difficult, slow and expensive.

Those ethical rules don’t apply to private experiments. Social media companies routinely use an automated method called A/B testing to maximize users’ time online without their knowledge. I once coded such programs myself. Ten years ago, Facebook intentionally made many users feel depressed by selecting depressing news for their feeds.

The most extreme human experiment today is the ingenious gadget called the Distractatron, which CoComelon owner Moonbug Entertainment uses to optimize the show’s captivating effect. As a test infant watches the show on a main screen, a screen to the side plays boring, real-world scenes to vie for their attention — this is the Distractatron. Every time the kid’s attention wanders to that second screen, program creators declare that moment a weak point. They add yet more attractants to the video to prevent the baby from un-glueing its eyes. 

I’d urge readers to view Time’s pro-corporate, propagandizing take on CoComelon. Note how it positively describes the show’s content without addressing that its attractiveness comes from low-level cues that exploit child biology. Babies can’t even comprehend the identified “positives” while they’re learning to use their eyeballs.

Scientifically speaking, optimizing for captivation is like optimizing a digital drug. The fact that optimized shows all reproduce the same high-speed, high-frequency sonic and visual textures proves the science of attention-grabbing works. Unfortunately, the goal is to create addiction, not stop it.

The baby in the lab may not be harmed much by those few hours of experimentation, but the finished show puts infants everywhere at risk, for their whole lives. Which country will step forward first to renounce and forever forswear such experiments, data and lessons and products based on them?

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.